Mail sticks out of the mail box at a house on Park Hill Drive in Pittsburgh’s East Hills on Tuesday, March 4, 2025. Park Hill has been hit with abandonment, which nonprofit Rising Tide Partners has tried to counter through conservatorship. (Photo by Anastasia Busby/PublicSource)
Conservatorship allows someone to take control of someone else’s abandoned property. The Pennsylvania law’s provisions are being weighed in court even as its effectiveness is tested in the streets.
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Conservatorship is a legal process to halt dilapidation and abandonment. Private companies, nonprofits and neighborhood organizations have filed hundreds of petitions to become court-supervised conservators of properties that fit certain criteria.
Once named a conservator, a group can:
- Spend money on improvements and then place a lien on the property
- Use the lien to collect money spent on the improvements or take ownership.
Nonprofit organizations and for-profit real estate players have used the court-regulated tool to improve — and sometimes take ownership of — problem properties.
A legal test for Pennsylvania conservatorship law
A conservatorship case related to a Pittsburgh Central Northside property is testing the law, especially its premise that nonprofit organizations are the preferred conservators.
Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas Judge Chelsa Wagner gave control of the house to a private developer, Todd Meyer, spurning a rival filing by nonprofit Rising Tide Partners. While acknowledging that the state’s conservatorship law calls on her to prefer nonprofits over individuals as conservators, she wrote that nonprofit Rising Tide’s plans were “generic, general and vague.” Rising Tide has appealed to the Superior Court.
Rising Tide Executive Director Kendall Pelling says nonprofits’ ability to use the conservatorship law is crucial to addressing the affordable housing crisis. “We can’t just watch these houses rot away for the next 10 years and then wonder, ‘Huh, why aren’t there any houses for people to live in?’” Pelling said in an interview.
Questioning the constitutionality of conservator control
The Superior Court could set a precedent that would affect future conservatorship cases.
Some attorneys even question the constitutionality of conservatorship, as it strips control of property from the owner.
“I’ve had situations where there haven’t been any citations by the city,” said attorney Gregory Biernacki, who has represented property owners trying to fend off conservatorships.
“So if the city is not that aggrieved that they haven’t come out and issued a violation … Why should some private actor be able to come in and take that property and be awarded the conservator [status] and the windfall from that? That doesn’t make any sense to me.”
Conservatorship across Pittsburgh neighborhoods
Pelling points to Rising Tide’s effort to turn around part of Pittsburgh’s East Hills neighborhood.
Rising Tide has gained ownership of 47 properties on a single street — Park Hill Drive — in East Hills since 2021. Forty of those are occupied rentals, according to Pelling.
Though Park Hill Drive continues to have many of the same issues it did in 2021 — vacancy, safety concerns and neglect — Pelling said work has been done on the buildings to stabilize them internally and reduce overall decay.
Rising Tide has also used conservatorship in Homewood and Garfield. It has been a tool in East Liberty’s transformation, too.
Correction (3/19/25): The number of conservatorships pursued by Rising Tide Partners is 87. Court filings by a similarly named entity were mistakenly included in the total initially reported.
Eric Jankiewicz is PublicSource’s economic development reporter and can be reached at ericj@publicsource.org or on Twitter @ericjankiewicz.
Bella Markovitz is an editorial intern at PublicSource and can be reached at bella@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Jake Vasilias.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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